IRS attacks survivor of Japanese internment camp

May 23, 2013

By John Seiler

How low did the IRS go in assaulting free Americans? About as low as it gets.

New Mexico Watchdog reports on the IRS hounding of Marianne Chiffelle, an 83-year-old grandmother who was interned in Indonesia by the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II. These camps were utterly brutal. A friend of mine’s mother, like Chiffelle of Dutch extraction, also was interned in those camps and still suffers from the horrors of those years.

Now the IRS is after Chiffelle. Her “crime”? She’s holds breakfasts:

The Internal Revenue Service not only wanted a wide variety of information from the Albuquerque Tea Party‘sapplication for non-profit status, it also wanted to know what contacts it had with people from other political organizations too.

That included an 83-year-old great-grandmother who was once held in a World War II internment camp, New Mexico Watchdog has discovered.

“I’ve always paid my taxes and everything,” Marianne Chiffelle told New Mexico Watchdog. “What I do think is, it doesn’t surprise me…because of this government we have at the moment.” 

According to a review of documents conducted by the online news organization Politico, (in a story headlined “The IRS wants YOU — to share everything”), the IRS asked the Albuquerque Tea Party about connections to other groups, including “Marianne Chiffelle’s Breakfasts.”

That prompted us to do some digging.

It took New Mexico Watchdog less than an hour to learn that “Marianne Chiffelle’s Breakfasts” is not some restaurant chain, but a reference to the volunteer work of Chiffelle, a retiree who helps organize informal 9 a.m. meetings for members of the Bernalillo County Republican Party.

The group meets on Fridays at the Golden Corral restaurant at the corner of Eubank and Central.

“We’ve had these meetings for a long time,” Chiffelle said. “It’s not a business.”

It took the full force of the U.S. military, helped by the British, Dutch and other allies against fascism and militarism, to defeat Imperial Japan in 1945 and set free Chiffelle and other captives. Let’s hope a similar effort isn’t needed to get rid of the dreaded, tyrannical IRS.